Implications for Good

[djolds1]

There'll still be reason for war in an immediately post-scarcity future. Only thorough education of a large majority of the world will remove war as an omnipresent concern.

Progressives have been trying to engineer the "New Man" via education for the last 250 years. It has never worked. If anything, the educated, "Enlightened" leaders such as Robespierre, Lenin and their ilk have been far more vicious than the reactionaries. You need to break a lot of eggs while shoving round human pegs into the square holes dictated by rationally "proper" theory.

Would wealthy people want to fight in such a world, and for what, there wouldn't be a point.

Access to women. The age old reason.

The West has been "spoiled" in its approach to war. We think our wars are terrible things, but compared to the historical human norm, the way the West fights war is artificial and restrained:

The State declares war and peace
The Army fights war
The People stay out of war, and are guaranteed their property and lives in return

This type of "trinitarian" (aka Westphalian) war is a hothouse flower. If the people do not stay out, it implodes. That is why the West's traditional laws of war are so harsh to irregulars - they make it impossible for war to end with the surrender of one or more of the states involved. If the people do not accept the surrender of their state and keep fighting, the only way to secure an end to the violence is to make a desert and call it peace. Carthaginian Rules.

Kill all the males over 10
Burn everything, salt the earth
Enslave the women and younger children, scatter them to the four corners of the world

This way the enemy no longer exists as a culture. There is nothing to reform, to come back and seek vengeance in the next generation.

And ever since WW2, the West has been quietly accepting the return of people's war. Call them "national liberation movements" or whatever you please. The natural human way of war is returning. And it is far more cruel than what we deceive ourselves into thinking "war" is (WW2 Western front).

[choff]

My contention is that if we keep on thinking we can allow military technology to evolve unchecked a situation will arise we can't handle.
Particle beam weapons will give no 30 minute warning of attack, it's speed of light. With automation of the process decisions are out of our hands even more.

Anybody that starts a war over a woman is a complete idiot. That's even dumber than fighting over religion or soccer games.
We have advances in reproductive technology all the time, and robotics.

Religion is being used as a front in the war on terror, its all about business.

Going to war over a soccer game comes from using sports as a distration and indoctrination tool.

[Betruger]

djolds, That's something like the third time you bring this up.

The education I'm thinking of has nothing to do with any political regime whatsoever. A properly educated man will know both peaceful and martial means to get done what needs to be done. It doesn't take any kind of brainwashing to realize that peaceful means are, everything else being equal, preferable to war. Of course this is simplifying (e.g. there's no such clear black and white boundary between peace and war), but that's the gist of it.

Otherwise let's all go back to the caves and quarrel over any and all perceived slights when some other ape farts in our direction in the wrong tune.

[Torulf2]

Yee the pax romana was peace threw genocides.
It’s my conviction that a energy source like polywell may make the world more peaceful. If so there will be lesser will to spend tax money to develop more weapons. But the peace com not from lesser weapon development but from stabile economic development.

[Roger]

Playing with beam weapons, on the surface of a planet is just wrong on so many levels.

[MSimon]

Anybody that starts a war over a woman is a complete idiot. That's even dumber than fighting over religion or soccer games.

And yet the women wars are encoded in us (reproduction) and fights over religion and soccer are every day occurrences (with the religion fights more intense).

There is what makes sense (from a certain perspective) and what happens.

Being of the engineering persuasion I prefer dealing with what happens.

[MSimon]

Playing with beam weapons, on the surface of a planet is just wrong on so many levels.

Unless you use them to shoot down ICBMs. And if they are developed for that they will eventually be reduced to hand held devices.

cue up Star Wars theme music

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oma9uPz9YYk

[MSimon]

Yee the pax romana was peace threw genocides.
It’s my conviction that a energy source like polywell may make the world more peaceful. If so there will be lesser will to spend tax money to develop more weapons. But the peace com not from lesser weapon development but from stabile economic development.

Yes. I think "more peaceful" is the operative point. Not peace everywhere and always.

[kunkmiester]

Talking about particle beam weapons brings up an interesting point, I'll have to put it on another thread though.

[choff]

I'll admit fights do break out over women, religion and soccer, but not huge wars between superpowers. Polygamist societies find wars useful for disposing of the surplus male population. If the Taliban ever figured that out they might quit fighting for Islam and argue for social change in Muslim countries instead. I read a recent report the Taliban's main objective these days is acquiring money through the opium trade, to the extent they avoid combat. That should discourage recruits who think its about religion. They outlawed soccer too, the Taliban shoot at kids they catch playing the game.
These days, and more so in the future, fighting over women should decline regardless, the women will insist on doing all the fighting.

[Betruger]

That's not the only trend. Technological progress will mean that even with good hermetics, increasingly minor conflicts will have increasing lethal potential. Today rogue states can nearly get themselves nukes, whereas after WWII only superpowers could manage it at the cost of superprojects. Today you've got warfare mediums like the internet, biology (e.g. anthrax envelopes, why not binary explosive guerilla warfare?), etc. What about in the future? Even the woman thing (almost ridiculous IMO) could be enough.

[djolds1]

Playing with beam weapons, on the surface of a planet is just wrong on so many levels.

Unless you use them to shoot down ICBMs. And if they are developed for that they will eventually be reduced to hand held devices.

Perhaps. Depends on what the physics allows.

cue up Star Wars theme music

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oma9uPz9YYk

Wrong one. Try:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bzWSJG93P8

[djolds1]

Yee the pax romana was peace threw genocides.

That is the human norm.

It’s my conviction that a energy source like polywell may make the world more peaceful.

Dunno. It will certainly change things. I am of the opinion that certain emerging technologies are conspiring to make large scale social groups less survivable, not more so, and are also reducing the advantages of economies of scale.

If so there will be lesser will to spend tax money to develop more weapons. But the peace com not from lesser weapon development but from stabile economic development.

France's biggest trading partner in 1913 was Germany. The primacy of economics is a Marxist fallacy. If anything, stable peace comes only in the static, authoritarian empires such as Egypt, Persia, Rome, Byzantium and China. But there is no scientific or technological advancement within those regimes.

[djolds1]

I'll admit fights do break out over women, religion and soccer, but not huge wars between superpowers.

Dial back a few centuries to this itty bitty event in Europe called "The Reformation." Observe consequent effects, and reanalyze your above statement.

These days, and more so in the future, fighting over women should decline regardless, the women will insist on doing all the fighting.

War is an overwhelmingly male occupation. Ideology can paper over that for a time, but only for a time. Besides, men like war, and women like warriors.

[Roger]

fighting over women should decline regardless,

LOL, cogent, and probably applies to a wider range of issues.

Playing with beam weapons, on the surface of a planet is just wrong on so many levels.

Unless you use them to shoot down ICBMs.

Who the hell would come to a beam weapon party with nukes on missiles? Think it thru MS..... consider the scale of the implications, please.

Russia, China, India, the US and maybe a EU country will all likely develop beam weapons. At that point the ICBM belongs in a museum.

Because thats what will happen, as soon as a beam weapon is practical, everyone will want one, and so that window of superior firepower vs ICBM's is very limited. While a rough period of Beam weapon parity will exist for much longer.

Like I said playing with beam weapons on the surface of a planet is just freakin wrong.

Some people still want the US to build Fleet carriers.... But the time when you could win a fleet level action with carriers is 60 years gone by. But yet the carrier mentality is still very strong here in the US, even though a single Sunburn going terminal at mach 4.5 will very likely hit, and might sink the US carrier. And there is a similar school of thought about the ICBM, which will go the way of the Fleet carrier, and quite soon too.

So that leaves you and me at 50 paces with beam weapons. Well I say the room is too small for that.

50 paces or 500 nautical miles... means nothing to a beam weapon. Its akin to holding up a bodega with the electric Gatling Gun that Jesse Ventura had in the movie Predator. The Bodega will not survie the encounter. Just like the bodega is too small for the Gatling gun, the Planet Earth is too small to be playing with beam weapons.